Xavier Defrang

...including the long awaited XML Digital Signature at field level!

Now it's going to be really hard to get more enterprisey than this!

The Diegem folks must be in a profound state of distress to reach such a low... After giving away cash to a bunch of obedient (and supposedly popular) bloggers, they are taking their guerilla marketing to the empty streets of Flanders office parks...

I was at a customer's when a Windows Vista branded SUV stopped on the parking lot and 3 promogirls lead by a guy dressed in a Mounty uniform (yes, like Peter) stormed the place to give away some candies (in surgical quantity) and promote the world's ugliest graphical interface to a 16-bit operating system.

Too bad for them, all the company desktop computers were Macs... so they took their gas guzzler to the next corporate building... just a few meters away. No comment...

I'm very curious to know how many people actually went to a store and left 500€ on the counter for a boxed version of Vista Ultimate. Last time I checked, they were not exactly flying off the shelves. All the people I know who installed this thing rolled back to Windows XP within days or even hours. One went as far as to say that we were back to Windows 95...

As BitTorrent gets more and more popular — after the RIAA busted a handful of infamous trackers — and evildoers #1 start making convenient websites it has never been easier and comfortable to infringe copyright laws.

Some very popular and addictive shows are already available only a few hours after they aired. With an ever increasing population of seeders, we may soon reach a theoretical tipping point where the download time of a show is actually shorter than the cumulated duration of all advertisement sequences you have to endure if you watch it live on television...

Congratulations to Belgium's Ministry of Finance IT department which made it to the Daily WTF. I guess that's not everyday that one overestimates about €900 millions. When the bug was discovered, the upcoming october 8 poll certainly did not helped the communication between all the politically appointed managers supposedly in charge...

No one can blame them as the poor fellows must be overworked since Belgium tax burden keeps increasing. Somebody please wake me up when this country nearly looks like the worst place in Denmark or Sweden...

How come I haven't heard anywhere that freshly open sourced Apple Calendar Server is written in... Python.

The DAV based service is built on top of the Twisted framework. Good to see that for Apple : language matters. First they dropped the Cocoa-Java bridge to favor Objective-C and now they release some really cool stuff developed in a high-level, dynamic scripting language.

The lack of good open source calendaring solution was one of the main reasons even businesses heavily using free software were stuck with Outlook/Entourage and Exchange.

With Leopard, Apple is clearly aiming at Microsoft on both the home and business fronts. Chairs must be flying low in Redmond...

TSS reaches new low as morons celebrate the recent Rails incident.

I'm still having mixed feelings about the (lack of) full-disclosure on the issue, I'm still unable to tell if a mistake has been made.
Although they should have provided the URL rewriting based workaround in the first place (instead of rushing out a release and force people to upgrade their systems a partial fix), I can understand they didn't want to tell people their site is vulnerable with using simple URL without giving them any change to upgrade...

As soon as you decide to rely on a framework to build your applications, you establish a close relation of trust with the designers and maintainers of that piece of software. On that peculiar case, I have enough confidence in the skills, the experience and, ultimately, the goodwill of the Rails core to know that when I'm being told to upgrade now, I just do it.

Do you ask yourself that many questions when your OS vendor pushes a new security update? It's just a matter of trust between you and your suppliers or delegates.
The most important thing is to constantly (re)evaluate that relation if you don't want yesterday's trust to become today's blind faith...

UPDATE: More ignorance unfolds as someone posted a follow up on the 1.1.6 release. Be warned: some very graphic examples of deep cluelessness are displayed in there...

This subjective top 10 of the most beautiful Mac apps illustrates perfectly the pointlessness of the latest geek chic : unswitching from Tiger to the Linux distro of the month.

The Mac software ecosystem doesn't stop at Apple's applications and their so called proprietary file formats. Most innovations come from freewares and sharewares, carefuly crafted by small teams of talented developers.

I'm sure there are dozens Linux application which have the very same set of features than those apps. But user experience is not about the feature list, it's about predictability and seamless integration with the operating system and the other applications... and we're not nearly there in the jungle of the Linux desktop.

Dear morons asshats developers of SmartSVN,

Since when does "remove that added but uncommited directory from version control" actually means "erase all those new files in that directory"?

Rule #1 of version control software is : do not fucking mess with my local files and especially DO NOT FUCKING PHYSICALLY ERASE ANY FILE ON MY GODDAMN COMPUTER WITHOUT MY EXPLICIT CONSENT.

Not to mention that your Java garbage doesn't know shit about the existence of an operating system Trash.

Please be sure I'm not going to run your software again anytime soon, in fact it's already wiped off my hard drive, just like all the code I wrote today.

Best regards

My recent experience using Word shown that it was unable to stay out of the way even to create the dumbest possible document such as a presentation outline only made of titles and bullet lists.

I wonder if anybody in Redmond has already figured out that they could kill 90% of the 'features' present in Word without anyone noticing? In fact, the only change to Word people would notice is a facelift to get the remaining 10% right! And I'm not even going to start about how badly Office.X behaves compared to any other Mac application I've ever seen...

Looking at the awful visual bloat of the upcoming Vista catastrophe, I think it's safe to say that the situation is hopeless...

Now which software to use to produce printed material when a professional desktop publishing application is overkill?

I gave a shot to Pages but it's not yet as impressive as Keynote and a bit too presentation-driven. I prefer tools that focus on structure instead.

For the average document to be read on screen or for which the quality of the printed output doesn't really matter, NVU seems like a good option but HTML and custom print CSS are a bit too light for any serious printed material.

Maybe should I get back to my post-teenage love LyX which used to be my main authoring environment back in my CS student (and UNIX geek) days... damn, I can't believe I was such an hardliner that I was using OpenLook at that time!

Talking about TCO, the incredible amount of precious time I've been wasting since a couple of days using the crapware which is Microsoft Visio, is already worth the price difference between that PC laptop and a trusty Mac running a registered copy of OmniGraffle. Visio is nothing less than a crime against taste and usability, the authors of this steaming pile of dungware should be beaten, hung and burned with no trial... or maybe somebody just send them to camp X-Ray... They shall pay!